Teleconferencing is a very popular means of communication in today's society. Persons in different locations, e.g., in the building next door, down the street, across the state or around the world, can communicate audibly and sometimes visually in the same conference by means of conference calling. In the typical conference call, multiple persons communicate over multiple lines that are all interconnected and carry all participants' voices. Because all persons can be speaking at a given time, and noise or other sounds from all sources are received by all participants, it can be difficult to distinctly hear the loudest talkers clearly.
Teleconferencing can be accomplished using a variety of techniques. For example, one of the participants in the call can originate multiple calls to the respective parties to be involved in the conference call. Alternatively, the participants may all call a common teleconferencing service that connects all of the incoming calls, for a particular conference, to each other. Audio and visual information for teleconferences can be carried over packet-based networks such as the global packet-based network known as the Internet.
Referring to FIG. 1, previous systems have used a conference bridge that received and output packetized data. Packetized data representing speech from N talkers was received and decoded by decoders. The decoded signals were transmitted to logic that selected the L loudest talkers. The signals for the L loudest talkers were mixed in the conference bridge and encoded and packetized. The encoded and packetized data were sent over a packet-data network toward receivers.